Denver janitors: it’s discriminatory not to communicate with us in Spanish

“A group of Spanish-speaking custodial workers in Colorado have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the Auraria Higher Education Center in Denver discriminated against them by failing to provide Spanish translations.” [Caroline May, Daily Caller; Denver Post]

When I married for the first time, I got married in Germany. We were required to hire, and pay, an approved interpreter. The government did not provide interpreters or translators, and you had to hire an approved interpreter because the government knew that that person was qualified and fluent in both languages.

If you don’t speak the predominant language of a country it should be inherent on you to get translations.

Anecdotally, when I took my son to pre-kindergarten testing 6 years ago, a lady with a pronounced accent was asked if she required a bilingual aide to help her through the process. She said, and I quote, “We are Romanian. We speak English.” Of course, a Romanian bilingual aide would not have been available. Only Spanish.

We have the largest Polish population in Northern Illinois outside of Warsaw. We have a lot of former Eastern Bloc immigrants here. We have over 1,000 Indian families in the county. They’ve built a Hindu Temple here. There’s also a local Mosque a half a mile from a Greek Orthodox Church. Our area is very diverse, but school communications come in English and Spanish. That’s it.

It costs a lot to translate and print all the documents in two languages. If each family was required to obtain their own translations the school district and all government entities could save a lot of money.

Maybe the people who run the Auraria Center should turn the tables; file a complaint with the EEOC claiming the Spanish-only-speaking custodial workers are the ones discriminating against the Auraria Center’s other workers, by the custodial workers not learning English or providing translatorsfrom Spanish to English. Hmmmm…..